PULSE CODE MODULATION DATA COMPRESSION FOR AUTOMATED TEST EQUIPMENT

Abstract

Development of automated test equipment for an advanced telemetry system requires continuous monitoring of PCM data while exercising telemetry inputs. This requirements leads to a large amount of data that needs to be stored and later analyzed. For example, a data stream of 4 Mbits/s and a test time of thirty minutes would yield 900 Mbytes of raw data. With this raw data, information needs to be stored to correlate the raw data to the test stimulus. This leads to a total of 1.8 Gb of data to be stored and analyzed. There is no method to analyze this amount of data in a reasonable time. A data compression method is needed to reduce the amount of data collected to a reasonable amount. The solution to the problem was data reduction. Data reduction was accomplished by real time limit checking, time stamping, and smart software. Limit checking was accomplished by an eight state finite state machine and four compression algorithms. Time stamping was needed to correlate stimulus to the appropriate output for data reconstruction. The software was written in the C programming language with a DOS extender used to allow it to run in extended mode. A 94 - 98% compression in the amount of data gathered was accomplished using this method.